Love Stories in China
Love Stories in China

Author: Wanning Sun

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-07-31

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 1000497232

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This book explores how political, economic, social, cultural and technological forces are (re)shaping the meanings of love and intimacy in China's public culture. It focuses on a range of cultural and media forms including literature, film, television, music and new media, examines new cultural practices such as online activism, virtual intimacy and relationship counselling, and discusses how far love and romance have come to assume new shapes and forms in the twenty-first century. Love Stories in China offers deep insights into how the huge transformation of China over the last four decades has impacted the micro lives of ordinary Chinese people.

Falling in Love
Falling in Love

Author:

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2006-05-31

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780824829957

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Falling in love, with all its accompanying problems, was a subject of obsessive interest among writers and readers in the Ming Dynasty, when society held strictly to arranged marriages. The stories in this engaging collection all deal with this theme in very different ways, sometimes comically, sometimes tragically. They portray young people choosing their own lovers, resorting to ingenious stratagems and risky escapades in defiance of contemporary mores. Chosen to represent the best works from the great age of the vernacular story, they offer an admirable introduction to the world of Chinese fiction in this era. All of the stories in Falling in Love have been translated especially for this volume, and most appear here in translation for the first time. They are taken from two works, Constant Words to Awaken the World (Xing shi heng yan) and a related collection, The Rocks Nod Their Heads (Shi dian tou), both published in the early seventeenth century.

I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China
I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China

Author: Wen Zhu

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0231136943

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In five richly imaginative novellas and a short story, Zhu Wen depicts the violence, chaos, and dark comedy of China in the post-Mao era. A frank reflection of the seamier side of his nation's increasingly capitalist society, Zhu Wen's fiction offers an audaciously plainspoken account of the often hedonistic individualism that is feverishly taking root. Set against the mundane landscapes of contemporary China-a worn Yangtze River vessel, cheap diners, a failing factory, a for-profit hospital operating by dated socialist norms-Zhu Wen's stories zoom in on the often tragicomic minutiae of everyday life in this fast-changing country. With subjects ranging from provincial mafiosi to nightmarish families and oppressed factory workers, his claustrophobic narratives depict a spiritually bankrupt society, periodically rocked by spasms of uncontrolled violence. For example, I Love Dollars, a story about casual sex in a provincial city whose caustic portrayal of numb disillusionment and cynicism, caused an immediate sensation in the Chinese literary establishment when it was first published. The novella's loose, colloquial voice and sharp focus on the indignity and iniquity of a society trapped between communism and capitalism showcase Zhu Wen's exceptional ability to make literary sense of the bizarre, ideologically confused amalgam that is contemporary China. Julia Lovell's fluent translation deftly reproduces Zhu Wen's wry sense of humor and powerful command of detail and atmosphere. The first book-length publication of Zhu Wen's fiction in English, I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China offers readers access to a trailblazing author and marks a major contribution to Chinese literature in English.

Our Story
Our Story

Author: Rao Pingru

Publisher: Pantheon

Published: 2018-05-08

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1101871504

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Begun by the author when he was eighty-seven years old and mourning the loss of his wife, Our Story is a graphic memoir like no other: a celebration of a marriage that spanned the twentieth century in China, told in vibrant, original paintings and prose. Rao Pingru was twenty-four-year-old soldier when he was reintroduced to Mao Meitang, a girl he’d known in childhood and now the woman his father had arranged for him to marry. One glimpse of her through a window as she put on lipstick was enough to capture Pingru’s heart: a moment that sparked a union that would last almost sixty years. Our Story is Pingru and Meitang’s epic but unassuming romance. It follows the couple through the decades, in both poverty and good fortune—looking for work, opening a restaurant, moving cities, mending shoes, raising their children, and being separated for seventeen years by the government when Pingru is sent to a labor camp. As the pair ages, China undergoes extraordinary growth, political turmoil, and cultural change. When Meitang passes away in 2008, Pingru memorializes his wife and their relationship the only way he knows how: through painting. In an outpouring of love and grief, he puts it all on paper. Spanning 1922 through 2008, Our Story is a tales of enduring love and simple values that is at once tragic and inspiring: an old-fashioned story that unfolds in a nation undergoing cataclysmic change. (With gorgeous full-color illustrations throughout, and a distinctive exposed spine emulating the original Chinese design.)

Made in China
Made in China

Author: Anna Qu

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2021-08-03

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1646220358

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A young girl forced to work in a Queens sweatshop calls child services on her mother in this powerful debut memoir about labor and self-worth that traces a Chinese immigrant's journey to an American future. As a teen, Anna Qu is sent by her mother to work in her family's garment factory in Queens. At home, she is treated as a maid and suffers punishment for doing her homework at night. Her mother wants to teach her a lesson: she is Chinese, not American, and such is their tough path in their new country. But instead of acquiescing, Qu alerts the Office of Children and Family Services, an act with consequences that impact the rest of her life. Nearly twenty years later, estranged from her mother and working at a Manhattan start-up, Qu requests her OCFS report. When it arrives, key details are wrong. Faced with this false narrative, and on the brink of losing her job as the once-shiny start-up collapses, Qu looks once more at her life's truths, from abandonment to an abusive family to seeking dignity and meaning in work. Traveling from Wenzhou to Xi'an to New York, Made in China is a fierce memoir unafraid to ask thorny questions about trauma and survival in immigrant families, the meaning of work, and the costs of immigration.

My Beautiful Enemy
My Beautiful Enemy

Author: Sherry Thomas

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2014-08-05

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1101631120

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In this spellbinding romance by the acclaimed, USA Today bestselling author of The Luckiest Lady in London, a beautiful and cunning woman meets her match in a man just as dangerous and seductive as she is, putting both her heart and her future at risk… Hidden beneath Catherine Blade’s uncommon beauty is a daring that matches any man’s. Although this has taken her far in the world, she still doesn’t have the one thing she craves: the freedom to live life as she chooses. Finally given the chance to earn her independence, who should be standing in her way but the only man she’s ever loved, the only person to ever betray her. Despite the scars Catherine left him, Captain Leighton Atwood has never been able to forget the mysterious girl who once so thoroughly captivated him. When she unexpectedly reappears in his life, he refuses to get close to her. But he cannot deny the yearning she reignites in his heart. Their reunion, however, plunges them into a web of espionage, treachery, and deadly foes. With everything at stake, Leighton and Catherine are forced to work together to find a way out. If they are ever to find safety and happiness, they must first forgive and learn to trust each other again…

Butterfly Lovers
Butterfly Lovers

Author: HE ZHANHAO

Publisher: BEIJING BOOK CO. INC.

Published: 2017-01-01

Total Pages: 7

ISBN-13: 1616120975

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Butterfly Lovers

The Ugly Wife Is a Treasure at Home
The Ugly Wife Is a Treasure at Home

Author: Melissa Margaret Schneider

Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.

Published: 2014-08-15

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1612346944

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"The ugly wife is a treasure at home" is not just an idle expression in China. For centuries, Chinese marriage involved matchmakers, child brides, dowries, and concubines, until the People's Republic of China was established by Mao Zedong and his Communist Party in 1949. Initially encouraging citizens to reject traditional arranged marriages and instead wed for love, the party soon spurned "the sin of putting love first," fearful that romantic love would distract good Communists from selflessly carrying out the State's agenda. Under Mao the party established the power to approve or reject proposed marriages, dictate where couples would live, and even determine if spouses would live together. By the 1960s and 1970s romantic love became a counterrevolutionary act punishable by "struggle sessions" or even imprisonment. The importance of Chinese sons, however, did not wane during Mao's thirty-year regime. As such, in a world where nobody spoke of love, 99 percent of young women still married. The Ugly Wife Is a Treasure at Home draws the reader into the world of love in Communist China through the personal memories of those who endured the Cultural Revolution and the generations that followed. This collection of intimate and remarkable stories gives readers a rare view of Chinese history, social customs, and Communism from the perspective of today's ordinary citizens.

The Good Women of China
The Good Women of China

Author: Xinran

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2008-11-26

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0307485536

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When Deng Xiaoping’s efforts to “open up” China took root in the late 1980s, Xinran recognized an invaluable opportunity. As an employee for the state radio system, she had long wanted to help improve the lives of Chinese women. But when she was given clearance to host a radio call-in show, she barely anticipated the enthusiasm it would quickly generate. Operating within the constraints imposed by government censors, “Words on the Night Breeze” sparked a tremendous outpouring, and the hours of tape on her answering machines were soon filled every night. Whether angry or muted, posing questions or simply relating experiences, these anonymous women bore witness to decades of civil strife, and of halting attempts at self-understanding in a painfully restrictive society. In this collection, by turns heartrending and inspiring, Xinran brings us the stories that affected her most, and offers a graphically detailed, altogether unprecedented work of oral history.

Love in a Fallen City
Love in a Fallen City

Author: Eileen Chang

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2017-06-21

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1681372444

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Masterful short works about passion, family, and human relationships by one of the greatest writers of 20th century China. A New York Review Books Original “[A] giant of modern Chinese literature” –The New York Times "With language as sharp as a knife edge, Eileen Chang cut open a huge divide in Chinese culture, between the classical patriarchy and our troubled modernity. She was one of the very few able truly to connect that divide, just as her heroines often disappeared inside it. She is the fallen angel of Chinese literature, and now, with these excellent new translations, English readers can discover why she is so revered by Chinese readers everywhere." –Ang Lee Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang’s achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.